Selfhosted

Success story here. 6+ years running pihole on proxmox as my primary DNS for everything on my network. It’s never missed a beat, never crashed. I update infrequently. It’s just good software.

Anybody got the feeling some games may be negatively affected by a PiHole ?

It'd not really the reason I stopped using it but I suspected that some games didn't like it when PiHole was up...

Anyway this post motivated me to reinstall my RasPi.

I ran pi-hole on my NAS. Then I pointed my router at it to make it the DNS for my whole network. The only problem was it would create issues when I had a power outage. If things didn't start up with the right timing they would get wonky and certain devices would report as not having Internet.

That's why I bought an OpenWRT One so I could install an equivalent to pi-hole on in directly. Though I hit a snag with that and don't currently have that running.

I haven't noticed much of a difference without the pi-hole running (my NAS is dead right now). I think some of my devices had their own DNS settings so they weren't using the config from the router.

I run pi-hole in docker in the background of our libreelec (Kodi) home entertainment system and it works great. It's a MUST if you have kids, my son has more freedom to use the internet since I know he is mostly covered by extensive block lists. Using raspberry pi 400, we watch Netflix, play Nintendo games, watch YouTube and have a family hard drive for shared photos and files.

RPI is great but you have to consider SD card wear. It will not last you forever and at one point will fail. At that moment your dns is no more.

I used pihole for many many many years, never go back ever again. database crashes, random freeze, UI broke just from an API call and sometime just randomly. Tried on Pi2, Pi3, Pi4, VMs, the result was always the same. then I switched to adguard home, no issue ever since. I'm using it for:

1. DNS level adblock
2. Local DHCP server
3. DNS server for routing home stuff As DNS and DHCP is kinda important, I have a separate VM just for adguard and docker registry, 512-2G ram. Then I have 2 VMs running alpine as docker swarm, 8Gb each. It's important to make sure even if your "main" infra goes down, you will still have internet to search and debug - hence the separate VM. Also using an NFS share for persistent storage for the data.

I am one of those zillion users. I love it.

@bernhoftbret@lemmy.world pihole is great. I use AdGuard now but either is good. The important thing is having a dns server at home

I installed a Pi-Hole largely to serve as a local DNS, but enabled the ad-blocking 'cause it seemed silly not to. My wife got very upset. Apparently she likes the ads.

With that aside though, it seems to work quite well. Just make sure to (a) use a reasonably-powered device (my Pi Zero appears to be taxed by it) and you should probably use an Ethernet connection 'cause my Pi Zero regularly flakes out so DNS requests fail due to the IP being "unreachable" for a half second.

I ran it on a Pi Zero W for a bunch of years, and it was as stable and problem free as it gets.

Early this year I swapped out my wifi/router for a minipc running OPNsense. I retired the pihole since OPNsense has Unbound built in.

I run Pi-Hole in a docker container on my server. I never saw the point in having a dedicated bit of hardware for it.
That said, I don't understand how people use the internet without one. The times I have had to travel for work, trying to do anything on the internet reminded me of the bad old days of the '90s with pop-ups and flashing banners enticing me to punch the monkey. It's just sad to see one of the greatest communications platforms we have ever created reduced to a fire-hose of ads.

I use Pi-Hole unbound, and I really like it. However, Technitium seems to be the new favorite and has a lot of bells and whistles that Pi-Hole doesn't. I haven't run Technitium basically because Pi-Hole fits my needs. If I were just starting out, I would probably consider Technitium.

I have pihole running on an old Raspberry Pi B and it just chugs along. Except for the wonky update they put out a few months ago. That took some cleaning up after.
I check the dashboard a few times a day and it's a good way to notice network issues and misbehaving programs.
I'm also running it through cloudflared to encrypt the requests, in case my ISP is snooping on them.

Indispensible.

A longer answer would come out of: "What do you think of a home lab environment without Pi-Hole?"

I like it but just not on a Pi. I found it too unstable. I found it easier to host in a docker container.

Although these days i just use blocklists on my router.

pihole has got the best UX for DNS management hands down. it's easy, not overly complicated, and perfect for entry-level selfhosting.

the fact that it actively blocks ads is a bonus.

I preferred AdGuardHome over PiHole, but currently my servers are collecting dust as I need to get electrical work done before I can hook them up.

It really sucks…

PiHole 4b powering my home DNS. Been running for ~4 years as of next month (and still on the original SD card I installed it to!). 100% recommend.

Yes.

It's fine, did the job for me at the time. Just wanted the ad and nasty blocking. Keeping it and the filters up to date is easy.

Now have a pfSense box with pfBlocker-NG, which does essentially the same thing. Also runs Snort as an additional layer, and makes penning in IoT stuff possible.

Sadly, it was very bad. I tried it about five years ago on a Pi 4. In less than a year, the Pi crashed five or more times. Once it was due to a faulty SD card, and on several occasions it was due to other software on the Pi crashing. Each time, the internet went down, which made my family unhappy, especially when I was not at home and could not fix it.

I also saw little benefit as I already block ads on all my devices, and my smart home stuff has no internet access at router level.

I haven't tried it since. Should I try again now with redundancy? What are the benefits?

I used pihole for years, but the recent updates made me look for alternatives. There was a major (v6?) update fuckup, but also some random freezes and block lists going missing...

Looking for alternatives, I tried out Technitium. Extremely easy to set up, rock solid, running steady for about 6 months (with frequent updates), and they recently introduced built in high-availability.

I run Pihole on physical Pi's and once configured to my liking has been quite nice. I've even had family compliment that they miss the ad blocking when they leave the home :)

Technitium DNS Server is a bit more feature rich but honesty I would just run a DNS filter on your router

I'm running one Pi-hole, but not on RPi. One is an LXC container on my Proxmox host, another is on dedicated Dell Wyse thin client box.

I have that virtualized, times three. Two to have a failover, and third one with different settings for my kids (cloudflare's family dns)

I love it! It took me a bit to iron out all the kinks with my network, but I am completely happy with it now.

Maybe a controversial take, but I like pihole for blocking only - I have a pair of powerDNS servers set up for my internal name resolution. They recurse to Pihole, but can fall back to internet DNS servers if Pihole isn't responsive.

I tried pihole for local resolution and found it to be a fairly large pain to automate. Plus kubes has PDNS hooks for auto-updating DNS entries.

To anyone having issues running on a pi it’s likely either or both of the following item -cheap 5v power supply. Yes you can use an old phone charger but it won’t cut it for long term usage. Get a quality unit or better yet the branded pihole charger. We ended up with a Poe hat that it runs off. Sorted Ethernet and power supply.

-memory card. Buy a quality, fast card and you will be fine.

Going on 8 years with my current pi setup. One failure around 6 years in which was the memory card

I use technitium, but there is nothing "wrong" with using a pihole. I used to run several (containers, plus one physical), and have set up quite a few for family and friends.